arbeit-world
Walter Benjamin and Theodorno in a discussion of Net-life, Second Life,
and Crashland Tokyo. Just a snippet of intellectual work on the gritty
industrial wasteland of the northern east coast. The view is always
hallucinatory.
It's raining here among ordinary people. There's a sound of menace in the
background; nations and peoples are stirring, not always with equivalent
goals in mind. The species is out of control; roads are gouges of the
civil, keeping the wild at bay. The primary characteristic of the human:
an enormous inertia in the midst of plague, floods, fires, crusades, wars,
slaughter. The human is always on stand-by. If it were otherwise, there
would be different news to report.
It's snowing now, weather veering back and forth, downed wires. Pacific
world, one world, inconceivable. Power seized is power held. Global warm-
ing, peace overture, restraint, is always the face of the other. What is a
poor primate to do.
Among the aesthetics of the grit there's the power of absence. This film
never hurt anyone. The dead film: sightless, deaf, untouching, untouch-
able. The occupants hurtling down the road have always already passed this
way, passed that way. This is a new world which is identical with the old,
the flattened world, flat philosophy, planar. He speaks, it's always this
way. He answers with the same.
http://www.alansondheim.org/arbeit.mp4http://www.alansondheim.org/arbeit-poster.jpg